Minimalist Website Designing – 4 essential elements to consider

Minimalist Website Designing – 4 essential elements to consider

What is it that catches your eye the moment you land on a new website?

Is it the template, the layout, the font, the content, the video or the images?

I am sure it is a bit of everything. A beautiful and functional website is what everyone looks for. It needs to have a clutter-free look with lots of white space. It needs to have all the essential elements minus the flashy items that seem unnecessary and distractive.

Less is Definitely More here

A minimalist website is the one that can bring you all the traffic that you want, without leading to too many bounces. Keep only the essential elements and remove everything else. That way, it will load faster and be loved by the search engines too. Yet, while designing one, you need to make sure you don’t create something that is absolutely boring.

There are 4 main things that you need to consider while designing a minimalist website:

Reduced Content

Although content is the king, nobody would like to read too much of information on your website. Reduced content will have to therefore be your thumb rule while designing your website. Removing all the unwanted items and keeping only what is needed will help you capture the attention of your visitors and make them focus on the message that you want to convey to them through your website. For instance, there is the Huncwot website that has only four elements in it. There are absolutely no distractions whatsoever. Therefore, your attention automatically goes to these elements.

Negative Space

Negative space refers to the empty white space that has absolutely no elements. In fact it is this feature that makes a minimalist website very powerful. If you want an object on your website to gather all the attention, you need to make sure you leave a lot of negative space around that object. Many High-end fashion brands try to adopt the concept of negative space in order to look exclusive. For instance, you can look at the touch of elegance that negative space adds to this website of Leen Heyne, which makes its monochrome logo and company tag the center of focus. The gold and the sparkling gems of the jewelry only adds up to this focus.

Visual Harmony or Symmetry

Not only should the number of elements on your website be lesser, they should also be aligned to create visual harmony or symmetry. A strong grid would be needed in every minimalist website in order to root each and every element to the visual structure of the website. You will have to understand the various types of symmetry and learn to balance the small and large elements on your screen. In this context, it pays to know about the four forms of symmetry:

Halved Symmetry, where the screen can be divided into two halves horizontally or vertically. Example: The Velvet Hammer Website

Approximate Symmetry, where you create a balance of visual weight on both sides of your screen. Example: UXPin Website

Radial Symmetry, where you start off at the center point and then place the elements around it in a circular fashion. Example: The website of Carlo Barberis

Asymmetry, where in you create an organized chaos to make your website look active. Example: Julie Flogeac Website

Contrast

Contrast is definitely something that catches the eye and hence it acts as a powerful tool when it comes to designing a minimalist website. You can create a contrast through color, location, shape or size. For Example, the website of MotoCMS shows contrast in terms of color and size.

We are going to see more and more of minimalist websites in the near future. The focus will be on enjoying more detail and diversity, while retaining the core of scarce and simple elements.

Deb Dey

Deb Dey is a web designer and a wordpress fanatic. He loves spending his time helping small business owners. He regularly contributes to major web design journals. He is associated with 3Leaps Content Writing Agency.

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